The Media is Complicit in Ignoring Biden’s Decline

(Photo by Bryan Olin Dozier/NurPhoto via AP)

If there is one number I could drill into everyone’s head, it’s this one — President Joe Biden had a 52% approval rating when he barely won the Electoral College in 2020; he’s now at 36% approval! No incumbent has ever won if they are in the thirties in an election year – in American history!

The Biden dead-enders would have us believe that Biden is not only cognitively healthy but that he has the ability to mount a miraculous 16-point comeback, the likes of which have never been seen in American politics. This alternate reality was created by the Biden team and aided and abetted by mainstream media. Unfortunately, a lot of good people believed that alternate reality. A friend of mine worried that, after the debate, Biden might not win now. He had almost no chance of winning before the debate, now this race has turned into some sort of ritualistic slaughter. And Democratic voters still barely realize it.

Let’s be honest: the media that is pouncing on President Biden now played a huge part in creating this alternate reality in the first place.

They kept pretending that Biden was fine and implied that the Republicans were doctoring every video of Biden looking feeble. To be fair, the Republicans are the boy who cried wolf – they lie so often during the campaigns that it’s nearly impossible to take them seriously. But the job of a journalist is not to appease either side; it’s to tell the unvarnished truth. And the American media clearly failed at that job when it came to President Biden.

Democratic voters who watched cable news had no idea that Biden was this far down in the polls, and a lot of them still don’t! If I thought this race was that close, I might want to keep Biden in the race, too.

This reminds me of when American voters were in favor of invading Iraq because 7 out of 10 of them thought Saddam Hussein had attacked us on 9/11. The media keeps creating these enormous differences between actual reality and the alternate reality that the powerful support. The day after the debate Mika Brzezinski conceded, “It’s fine not to spin what happened last night.” So, you spin everything else? Obviously.

A lot of people in media are now complaining that if they questioned Biden’s mental state, the White House would come down on them like a ton of bricks. So what? That’s your job.

When I interviewed Sam Donaldson about his time as the White House correspondent at ABC News, he said that every time the Reagan or Clinton White House complained about him, Roone Arledge would give him a raise. That’s what we need to get back to! Real journalism that challenges the powerful. Not one that helps them create an alternate reality that deceives the American people.

The reason the Biden team was able to create this fiction of a strong candidate who was a “dynamo” behind the scenes is because the press collectively did a terrible job of informing their readers and viewers. They chose to accept and regurgitate obviously false talking points from the Biden campaign rather than aggressively challenge the powerful.

This didn’t help Democratic voters; it hurt them. It hurt their chances of being able to make the right choice about who should lead them. And now they wake up to find out they are very likely to lose to Donald Trump, which is shocking news to them.

Democratic voters are surprised because, as usual, the truth was hidden from them by a compliant press who is worried about losing access and being yelled at by the White House (let alone the fact that almost all of the reporters and anchors are establishment Democrats who favor a candidate like President Biden).

If the job of a reporter isn’t to point out that the emperor has no clothes, then what is the point of the profession? For the great majority of this campaign, the press helped the White House pretend that the president had clothes on, so when his metaphorical pants fell off in the middle of the debate, the country was genuinely shocked.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.